


Unbreak My Heart

by J02



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-31
Updated: 2019-03-31
Packaged: 2019-12-29 18:43:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18299873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/J02/pseuds/J02
Summary: What happens when Oliver suddenly appears in 2040?





	Unbreak My Heart

**Author's Note:**

> This story wouldn't leave my head after I saw speculation on Twitter that one of the fighters when Mia was getting her tattoo might have been Stephen Amell.

**Star City 2040**  
_Mia Smoak's hideout_

Felicity Smoak smiled faintly as she watched her children bicker over some detail of their mission. She'd spent more than twenty years dreaming of this moment but it was bittersweet. In all of her fantasies, even the ones that occurred after the day her worst fear had come true, the family reunion had included one more person. She tried to surreptitiously wipe away the tears that welled up as she thought about how proud her husband would be of William and Mia if he could see them now. If the life she and Oliver Queen had chosen had taught her anything, it was that "what ifs" and "what might have beens" were a waste of time but she still couldn't help but wish she could go back and convince him not to leave Bloomfield for Star City that day. William walked over, "Are you okay?"

"Yeah, it's just..." she trailed off, not quite able to voice the thought that had haunted her mind at least once a day for the last nineteen years.

"Dad should be here," William finished quietly and she nodded.

"Oh, frack!" Mia suddenly exclaimed from across the room.

Felicity and William immediately rushed over with Felicity asking, "What's wrong? Are you hurt?"

"No, I was supposed to meet my friend Jonas to spar tonight. There's no way he won't come looking for me, he's almost as overprotective as you are," Mia answered with an eye roll.

"Is he your boyfriend?" her mom asked eagerly.

She shuddered slightly, "No! He just took me under his wing when I started fighting-"

"And that's your definition of overprotective? He should have sent you home!" Felicity interrupted.  
  
"He tried...repeatedly but when it didn't work, he started training me and in time, he became sort of a father figure," Mia explained, feeling guilty when both her mother and brother winced slightly at the term. She mourned her father but she knew it was a very different grief than the one Felicity and William felt, the truth was that Oliver Queen had never really been more than an idea to her, the man staring adoringly at her mother in the handful of photos they possessed.

*-*-*-*

Jonas Dearden, as he'd been known for the last nineteen years, flattened himself against the wall outside the room as he listened to a voice he'd long since given up hope of ever hearing again pepper her daughter with questions. Questions about him. He knew he should go, the chances of the questions not leading Felicity Smoak to the truth were slim. Hell, if she even asked his full name, he was probably screwed and getting close to Mia had been enough of a risk, getting close to Felicity simply wasn't an option. He started to push away from the wall and disappear into the night as he'd done a million times before but stopped as he heard Mia tell her mother, "He has a lot of scars but most of them don't even seem to be from fighting...There's a weird brand on his shoulder and it even looks like he had a tattoo burned off of his chest. I guess no one ever told- Mom, what's wrong?!"

"It's not possible...There was a _body_ , I'd have never stopped looking if..." Felicity answered brokenly.

Before he could stop himself, he was in the room, "And I knew that. Which is why, when I realized I wasn't going to be able make it home, I arranged for a body to be publicly identified as mine. I'm sorry, none of you were supposed to end up here, it was the-"

"If that sentence ends in 'only way' I swear I'm going to scream! There is always another way, Oliv-" his wife interrupted fiercely before breaking into sobs as she tried to say his name.

"Felicity..." he whispered and when that simply made her sob harder, he did the one thing he'd been aching to do since he'd heard her voice, for the last nineteen years if he was being honest with himself, and pulled her against his chest. The relief he felt when her arms closed around him instead of pushing him away as he'd half expected was nearly indescribable but as he looked over her head at the confused, hurt and closing in on angry faces of their children, he knew the conversations to come wouldn't be easy. How did you explain to the love of your life and your children that you'd had no choice but to abandon them?

"Dad?" William finally asked while Mia just continued to stare at him.

Felicity lifted her head enough to ask, "Why?"

"I was being followed, I couldn't go home without leading the Circle to you and Mia. I planned to go home once they believed I was dead but Dante and Emiko were never fully convinced and by the time I thought it might be safe, I'd been gone more than ten years. I hoped you'd moved on, that you were happy and I didn't have the right to interrupt that," he explained quietly.

"She cried every day. She never thought I could hear her but-" his daughter finally spoke and he knew, from experience, that a sword to the chest would have been less painful than Mia's quiet words.

He closed his eyes as he began to fully realize just how much pain he'd put his family through. He flashed back to the cold shower room floor at Slabside and the utter devastation he'd felt at the coldly stated words "your wife is dead." It had been more than twenty years but he still couldn't think of the hours between hearing them and looking up to see her, battered and bruised but alive without feeling like his heart had stopped and the idea that she'd lived almost two decades with that feeling because of his decisions destroyed him. He looked down at the top of her head, "I'm sorry. I honestly believed you'd move on-"

"And moving on would have made raising a daughter who was exactly like you without you not devastating? I finally understood what my mom meant when she told me all she saw when she looked at me was what Dad gave me...Except Mom had rage to fall back on and all I had was grief, regret and a mind-numbing fear that I couldn't protect her"

"Felicity, baby, I..." he began but trailed off as he realized there was nothing he could say. He looked helplessly at his children as it occurred to him that this might not be getting his family back, it might be finally losing them completely.

Mia took her brother's arm and headed for the door, "We're going to get some air. Jon-Oli-Dad, I...Good luck."

  
*-*-*-*

  
As soon as her children left the room, Felicity pushed out of her husband's arms. A large part of her wanted to burrow in and never let go but almost two decades of lies and pain formed a chasm between them that she wasn't sure they could cross, "We'd been through so much, I always believed we could get through anything...But then suddenly, you were gone. I drove Barry, Sara and Ray crazy for months begging them to undo it and when they refused, I wanted to go with you. If it weren't for Mia, I think I would have-"

"Felicity, please...stop!" Oliver begged desperately.

"I blamed myself. I could have convinced you to stay. I knew the risk Star City presented-"

"We _both_ knew the risk. Do you think a second has gone by that I haven't wished that I'd finally chosen myself or us or our baby girl over a city that didn't give a damn? Almost every decision I'd made until that point was about not failing the city, I never imagined it would fail me so completely."

"I should never have convinced you to leave Ivy Town...If we'd stayed-"

"We'd have never known about William," Oliver pointed out. "Our life there wasn't sustainable anyway. Eventually reality would have intruded again. Or you would have snapped and finally killed the Hoffmans"

Felicity let out a surprised laugh before continuing, "Then we should have left after Slabside. I let my need to be a hero-"

"We could do this for the rest of our lives but we can't go back, all we have is here and now. So where do we go from here?"

"I don't know. I think that's why I'm focusing on the past. I know we can't change it but it's less terrifying than figuring out now. Because I love you so much and I've missed you for so long but what if-"

"After everything, this is the mountain we can't climb?" Oliver finished.

"I always knew 'I'll always come back' might not be a promise you could actually keep but I never dreamed that you'd _choose_ to break it!"

"That isn't fair, it wasn't that simple...I was sure trying to go home would get you and Mia killed so I gave up everything I held dear to protect you! What was I supposed to do, just stand back and watch my sister murder you?"

"I'm not going to pretend to know what you've been through or even that I know what the answer was but we have multiple friends with actual _superpowers_! Why didn't you ask for help?"

"Because sometimes we lose and I knew I couldn't live in a world where you were gone-"

"Whereas, I, on the other hand, simply loved living and raising a child in a world where you were gone...Do you even hear yourself right now? You couldn't deal with it but forcing me to was somehow fine?"

"It wouldn't have just been you, it would have been Mia too. And even it wasn't...Without me, you raised a brilliant, badass daughter. Without you...the best case scenario would be that I quickly followed you, the more likely one is that I made Malcolm Merlyn look like a pleasant memory-"

"Why do always act like you're on the verge of being a supervillain? You aren't that person, you never were!"

"You weren't inside my head when they told me Diaz had killed you...in that moment, I wanted John dead. My best friend, my _brother_ and I wanted to destroy him because he hadn't protected you-"

"You think I didn't want to kill everyone who refused to help me save you? Thoughts aren't actions, Oliver. And no matter what you think, if I were gone, you'd have found a way through the pain to be the hero you always were-"

"You can't know that. The darkness inside of me-" Oliver argued.

"You've always seen me as the light to your darkness but human beings aren't that simple. Everyone has darkness and light, including you, and if you'd had to then you'd have found that light to carry on for yourself, for William and for the city. Five years in hell turned you into a hero-"

"Five years in hell turned me into a violent criminal with a vendetta I didn't fully understand, meeting a blonde I.T. expert who saw through me turned me into a hero," Oliver corrected.

"I don't believe that...meeting changed us both in a million different ways but nobody can change someone that fundamentally, you were always destined to be hero and you would have gotten there, with or without me," Felicity replied.  
  
"Maybe," Oliver allowed, "but I'm not sure I'd have come home at all without you."

"That's sweet but it doesn't make sense, you'd been back for weeks when we met," Felicity pointed out.

Oliver smiled, "I can't believe I never told you...I saw you years before I officially came home, Amanda Waller had sent me to recover information from my mother's computer and while I was there I had to hide from an I.T. girl who talked to the picture of me on my mother's desk and told me-"

"You were cute and it was too bad that you were dead," Felicity finished in a whisper.

"Yeah...how do you remember that?"

"That night was so strange, I was sure someone was watching me but I wasn't afraid, it was like I instinctually knew that whoever it was would never hurt me," she answered.

"Not physically, anyway, I don't think there's a much of argument to be made about emotionally..." He trailed off and shook his head, "Not the point, knowing this bright, happy person saw something in a fairly horrible version of me with terrible hair and a serial killer smirk made me believe there might still be hope for me."

She reached for his hand, "Let's get our children and go home. Dinah and Rene can save the city this time."

"So that's it, we just move on, everything forgiven?" he asked, squeezing her hand.

"I've spent nineteen years without you, Oliver and I don't want to spend another minute. I'm not saying it will be easy but for the first time in almost twenty years, I feel like I can breathe again. I prayed for a miracle to bring you back and I finally got it...I'm not letting it go just because it's more complicated than I'd planned," she replied, placing her free hand on his cheek.

"But-" he began.

"Oliver, please, just shut up and kiss me," Felicity interrupted.

And so he did. The kiss almost twenty years was only in the making was only interrupted by an outraged "Seriously? Gross!" from their daughter and a laughing "I told you." from their son as they returned.

**Bloomfield 2047**

 

Oliver Queen smiled and put his arm around his wife's waist as their daughter approached, dragging her fiance behind her, "Connor, you're being ridiculous, he won't shoot you! He only ever shot bad people-"

Roy Harper glanced up, "Well, actually-"

"Shut up, Roy. Connor, Mia's right, Oliver would never hurt you, right, Oliver?" Felicity quickly interrupted. When her husband didn't reply, she nudged him with her elbow, "Right, Oliver?"

"Of course not," Oliver agreed and everyone, including Connor's parents, chose to ignore the rest of the statement, mumbled under his breath, "Unless he breaks her heart..."


End file.
